Expenditures on education
The place of America as a superpower has its roots in its education system. Therefore, every state has a responsibility of providing quality education to maintain this position. The value that South Carolina attaches to education shows in its expenditure on education. This expenditure item historically accounts for roughly one-third of the state’s budget. Between 2003 and 2008, the education budget for South Carolina grew from 2.9 to 3.7 billion dollars. Compared to earlier years, the state’s education expenditure grew by wider margins of approximately 0.2 Billion per year after 2005. The cost of educating a single student grew from 8776 dollars in 2003 to 11492 dollars in 2008. The largest increase in expenditure on education per student occurred in 2007. This cost jumped to 11012 dollars from 10226 dollars in the previous year. This shows that the cost of providing education in South Carolina is on the rise.
South Carolina’s Bus Transit
The Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA) provides statistics on various aspects of Transport in the United States. In 2007, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics published an analysis of the motor bus transit route mileage in the United States. The analysis used directional route-miles, which do not take into account the number of lanes. The analysis classified roads into three. The first category was those with exclusive right-of-way. In America, there are 27 states without exclusive right-of-way, among them, South Carolina. The rest of the states have a combined mileage of 1,850 miles. The next category in the analysis was controlled-right-of-way, which referred to some degree of rights given to some road users. In this category 33 states, among them South Carolina, did not have any of the 1,725 directional miles reported. When combined, the states had mixed-right-of-way roads totaling to 221,816 miles. Among these, South Carolina accounted for 2409.2 miles.
South Carolina Data Clearinghouse Critique
The South Carolina Data Clearinghouse is a source of economic data for South Carolina. It provides data on various aspects of the economic development of the state. As such, there are two areas that the South Carolina Data Clearinghouse can improve on. The first one is the process of updating data. In the case of the data on education, the latest statistics available are three years old. This limits the usefulness of the Clearinghouse to business-oriented users who require up-to-date information to make decisions. The way it stands now, the Clearinghouse serves as a source of historical data, which is useful for background studies but is insufficient for update decision making.
The second issue that the South Carolina Data Clearinghouse is the presentation of the data. There is a need to standardize the format for presenting the data even if it is borrowed from another source. The data reviewed on bus transit came from an affiliate site that has its way of presenting data. If the South Carolina Data Clearinghouse took the time to rearrange the data in a way that fits with the rest of the data hosted in it, then its usefulness will increase to business people. Lack of standardized data sets is a challenge to researchers and more so to business people who need to make quick decisions based on the best information they can find. Standardized presentation formats will help them a lot.